Never Meant Nevermore
by Ebontien
Summary: What would happen if after she returned home in the middle of the battle, Takiko wasn't able to return to Hokkan? How would her life have gone on without her duty as the Genbu no Miko? Slight AU.


Disclaimer: I do not own GK or any of its characters. That honour goes to Yuu Watase-san.

**Never Meant Nevermore**

She didn't know which was the worst of it-the waiting or the knowledge. Oh by all means Takiko Okuda could have left this world already but that simply wasn't in her nature, to be weak. She was the miko who ventured into the winter world of Hokkan and survived. The only thing was...she didn't win. The book entailed of a girl summoning a god to save a people and she hadn't managed that. Instead, Takiko, although she swore she would never, was sitting and allowing herself to be fussed over like a flower arrangement as a bride on her wedding day.

In the end, she didn't know who else to blame. She wanted to blame her father but upon discovering the true intentions of his expeditions to Cathay...it was also in her nature to forgive. She didn't forgive him right away. In fact, she never told him, not even when he died. The father she was growing to trust was gone. The chance that she had to say something before it was too late ran through her fingers but she didn't grasp it. Guess there were somethings she would never learn, at least not before it was too late to take back the wrong words.

"Miss Takiko, what are you doing? Crying on your wedding day? You're ruining your make-up." Her grandmother scolded her as quick wipes of cloth brushed her face. It had taken hours to get ready but she was getting her dream. Or rather her old dream. To marry Mr. Takao Oosugi.

Months after she returned home, Takiko faced another challenge she could not meet: the Kanto earthquake of September 1st, 1923 in the 12th year of the Taisho period. Her father, unable to bear the place where his wife died and was born, left but this time taking Takiko with him to Tokyo, a place where when they lived there before, when Yoshie was still alive. Maybe it was his way of dealing with neglect, even if he was searching for an answer to a wish that wouldn't be granted by ordinary means. Her father and her never became close but her original dislike lessened at a slow rate. She remembered the first day she was willing to give him a hug, something she didn't even do as a child. Then again, she wasn't one to turn away a person in need. However, she seemed to have a running track of not being able to help when it meant the most. Her mother's death. Her father's death in the earthquake. Their deaths in Hokkan.

Perhaps she had been melodramatic at the time when she first wondered if Uruki, Tomite, and the others survived. But if that wasn't enough, her bond with the seishi of Genbu would not **break**. She saw flashes of them: shy Hatsui, carefree Tomite, silent Naname, unknown Hikitsu, and Uruki, the "book character" she fell in love with. She saw them trying to find her, to summon her back. She saw them continue on with hope. She saw them die when Kutou invaded and the Emperor of Hokkan did nothing. She found that the man Haagasu was none other than one of the seishi of Genbu she was trying to find, the one named Urumiya, or rather just half of the warrior. The other half she had seen when Uruki and the others attacked the palace was a young boy named Tegu, Haagasu's older brother who remained untouched by time since he released his powers. She never did see who would be Inami.

Marrying Mr. Oosugi didn't come without a price. He too lost someone in the earthquake. Thankfully it wasn't his daughter, little Suzuno but rather his wife. Einosuke Okuda lived long enough to secretly ask Mr. Oosugi to take care of Takiko as best as as he could. Two seasons later, at the age of 20 he proposed and she accepted. By then she had gotten attached to Suzuno and in that found another who needed her. There was only so much her grandmother could do and even then her years were catching up. Takiko would have liked to stay single, and even though she had let go of her previous love for him, she found some peace with Takao.

It still didn't stop the visions when they came, of those of Hokkan she failed. Takiko hated to admit she was wrong but in this case, she felt she was. Uruki had warned her and she did die. The part of her who had promised to protect the people of Hokkan by summoning the god Genbu. She had promised the family that gifted her with the naginata she used on her travels. She had promised Boraate Tan, Tomite's mother, who had helped her adjust to Hokkan at first at the beginning of her journey. That little girl who gave her flowers to cheer up from the same village. There was Soruen, who stood by them even if he wasn't one of the seishi, who trusted her with Uruki. She had promised Anruu, the oracle who pointed her in the right direction. She wasted the lives of the High Priestess of Ifurei and her fellow priestesses when they lied in order to buy her and her seishi time. It was for nothing. She had promised. She had failed. She didn't give up.

People often wondered why Mr. Oosugi would let his new bride run wild as she did. With her constant reading on myths and lore in an obsession that made them wonder if she was possessed. Considering he was a fan of Einosuke's works and that he continued in a similar direction, they thought he indulged her too much by allowing her to be his research assistant. Then one day she did give up. It was the day she "saw" Tomite die and Hikitsu after him. Tomite, her first friend in Hokkan. He might not have been the first one she met when she went into the book but it was he that she knew more of. And then she broke his heart.

Reflecting back, she didn't notice at the time or maybe she didn't want to because it was complicated enough that she was in love with one "book character"; she didn't need to get attached to two. Still, it hurt because as unwilling as he was at first to being Tomite, Chamuka Tan had stayed with her through thick and thin. He believed her, believed in her, and she failed him. She missed him with his optimism and his light-hearted ways. He acted more his age than she could. Oh don't get her wrong, she could be rather reckless too but he took it just as much into stride as her. He made her laugh in odd ways and moments she remembered. She felt some of the light within her disappear the day he died. People started talking when she started praying at the local shrine, asking a Buddhist priest to say words over someone called "Tomite."

No death is equal to another. Each is painfully unique. She didn't know how much more it would hurt when Uruki died. He almost made it to the Emperor and his father in the palace, almost but almost wasn't enough. With Tegu using his powers through his song to nullify another seishi's powers, Uruki was trapped as Rimudo the man as arrows fell on him, Hatsui, and Soruen. She remembered he died calling out her name as a last plea for her to return. She collapsed in the marketplace that day, crying inconsolably.

It was no secret people wondered about her, wondered if she lost her mind. There were those who even went as far as to suggest an exorcism to Mr. Oosugi until he reminded them that she lost her family when she was young (both in the same year!) and that this was her way of surviving. There were days she wondered if he knew, if her father might have told him, but he never said anything and she didn't ask.

Suzuno was like a little sister to her more than a daughter. They bonded over similar things and remained close. Suzuno's favourite stories were those of the Universe of the Four Gods and how the Genbu no miko and her seishi saved it. She loved the little stories in-between of the sort of things that the group could get into such as the story of when the miko got "kidnapped." They helped Takiko remember, though Suzuno learnt never to ask about the book.

Their relationship remained strong, even when Suzuno finally gotten married and moved away to Nagasaki. They continued to keep in touch through various letters, of which their husbands would often tease them that there must have been more letters than grains of rice in their household with how much the two of them wrote to each other. Nonetheless, after Suzuno moved, Takiko was still needed by her two daughters and her son that she bore with Takao.

However, Japan decided to move against its western neighbours, Manchuria before spreading. Takao wished to join the movement and serve his emperor. Takiko was against it. If there was anything, _anything_ at all she had seen in her time in Hokkan, it was war and how needless it was. She couldn't help but feel like she was in her world's version of Kutou, invading everywhere else. But no one listened. If she wanted things to be okay for her two daughters to marry and her young son to be well provided for with the pay his father received, she couldn't speak. She hated it, but she kept silent. She didn't keep still, however.

In an act of irony, or maybe as a tribute to what Uruki had done with the Kutou army, she gathered secrets that she gleamed while working for the war effort in hopes to cease fighting on either side. She was never successful but she felt that at the very least she was doing something to stop the war other than caring for the injured of either side. And then, her husband died in battle at the same time as the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, taking away her new family in one strike. Takiko kept going, though she didn't know why she should. Her twin daughters still needed her. Her son still needed her. And perhaps it was because it was the only thing she knew.

After the war, her daughters were able to marry and moved away. She and her son moved to Kobe. He had received a big promotion afterwards and there they lived together for forty years without interruption. She never married again. She couldn't stand losing anymore people. She lost so many already, didn't life take away enough from her?

Apparently it didn't. There was still her life to end. She was 90 years old, a decade shy of a complete century. Long enough of a life to live, to have seen two world wars, to have two loves, to have lost both parents, and to have given two births. It was also long enough to see the second biggest earthquake to have hit Japan in one century on January 17, 1995, the 7th year of the Heisei period, at 5:46:46AM, the Great Hanshin earthquake.

She was old and tired. She was ready to die. She didn't want to die. And she laid dying under the rubble while her son was in better shape, nothing vital hit. She didn't know if she could hold on. "Mother, I still need you!" I cannot be needed anymore...was left unsaid in her mind. She never did find that book.

Takiko remembered one line as her eyes started closing, from something she learnt in English class that day that started these events, when her father came back. It was by a famous English poet, William Blake, who had written "to see eternity in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower."

_Takiko's eyes opened up, letting out a breath she didn't realize she had been holding, and suddenly she was aware. She had to find that book! Less than a second later, a gust of wind broke through the room, answering her call in the flashiest fashion, not unlike what Uruki would have done if he was there. She followed it and had a feeling she knew where it was. She would find it. She would get ready. She would go back, and whatever happened, come what may, she would not fail._

And little did the Genbu no miko know that she made her wish already with an offer on how to pay for that wish.

_"hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour." _


End file.
